The Times Op-Ed Is Whistleblowing, but the Author Should Come Clean

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

08 September 18

ashington has been buzzing this week in the wake of the New York Times op-ed by an unnamed senior Trump administration official saying that the president is, well, unhinged. I’ve been in Washington for 36 years, and I’ve only seen something like this a handful of times. Really, only Iran-Contra comes to mind, and Watergate before it. Las Vegas bookmakers are taking bets on who the author is, and the news networks can’t talk about anything else. I’m less interested in the substance of the op-ed than about the kind of person the author is. I would call that person a whistleblower.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is a legal definition of whistleblowing. It’s “bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety.” That’s pretty clear. And I think the author of the op-ed exposed abuse.

The whistleblower’s piece is a little self-serving: Paraphrasing, he or she said, “There are so many of us who want to save the country. We like what Trump stands for, but he’s insane. We are working to frustrate his worst inclinations. Thank God some of us take papers off his desk so that he doesn’t sign away the country, etc., etc.” That’s OK, though, because the bottom line is that the country actually is in danger right now.

The whistleblower notes that the root of Trump’s problem is that he’s utterly amoral and he doesn’t believe in anything; he has no guiding principles. He is “impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective.” He engages in “repetitive rants” and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed, and occasionally reckless decisions.” A majority of Americans would probably agree.

The whistleblower was careful to use lingo in the op-ed that several different senior officials use, most likely in an effort to mask his or her identity. The whistleblower used the word “lodestar,” frequently employed by Vice President Pence. He or she said that meetings with Trump veer “off the rails,” a phrase that Chief of Staff John Kelley has used in interviews many times. He or she said that at least there are “adults in the room,” a phrase that multiple journalists have attributed to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Why remain secret, though? Why write anonymously? Anonymity actually diminishes the value of the revelation. Several of my conservative friends, for example, believe that the op-ed was written either by a junior nobody in the White House, by a Democrat pretending to be in the White House, or by the New York Times staff itself to embarrass Trump. They don’t want to talk about the message. They only want to talk about the messenger. What did the op-ed’s author think would happen?

The only thing the person can do to get this very important information to the American people – and to make it stick – is to out himself or herself. We need to know if this person is in a position of authority in the White House. We need to know if this person has access to Trump. We need to know if he or she is biased and has an axe to grind.

The message would be so much stronger without the anonymity. Look at what Ed Snowden has done, Julian Assange, Tom Drake, or, humbly, me. We laid our information out there, took responsibility for it, and took the heat that came with that responsibility. Even Barack Obama said that the writer should not have asked for anonymity. “That’s not how a democracy works,” he said.

I agree. I would tell the whistleblower to come clean. It’s time to go public, resign from the White House, sign a giant book deal, and accept your footnote in history. That would be a public service.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

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